Giulio Regeni’s death reminds us no one is safe from Egypt's brutal police

There is a scene filled with terrifying suspense in the 1995 French film La Haine. Police have detained two young men, having found them to be in possession of a small piece of hashish.

They sit handcuffed to their chairs, side by side, as two cops beat and harass them. A third policeman, who is new to the job, sits and observes. This is a sort of training for him, a demonstration of how to effectively use violence. “They could be free in two hours, we gotta use our time wisely,” one of the policemen says to his new colleague. “You stay in control the whole time... the hard part is stopping in time, you can’t go too far.”

It has been over a week since Italian student Giulio Regeni’s body was discovered, tortured and broken, off a highway outside Cairo. Reports from Egypt and Italy indicate that he was taken in by police on the night he disappeared, although the Ministry of Interior has denied this.

At a memorial for Regeni in front of the Italian embassy in Cairo, an Egyptian man held up a sign written in Arabic which read “Giulio was one of us, and he died like one of us.” A message of solidarity, but also, an attempt to remind the world that Regeni’s death belies a wider crisis.

For months, Egyptian human rights groups and activists have been speaking out about a marked increase in police brutality in the country.

The Al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence reported more than 600 cases of torture in 2015. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented 14 deaths of detainees in a single police station over a two year period.

Enforced disappearances – when individuals are arrested by security forces and then cannot be found for days, weeks or in some cases, years – have also increased.

The victims have included other expatriates. In 2013, a Frenchman and long-time resident of Cairo was also killed in police custody.

Amid so many stories of brutality, Regeni’s death strikes a nerve because he was a foreign visitor to Egypt. Protection from police violence comes not from the law, but from a calculus of privileges tied up with class, race and geography that should have made Regeni – a white European in downtown Cairo – immune to the violence inflicted on Egyptians. This was not supposed to happen to him. That it did happen, to him and so many others, is a result of years of impunity for a security apparatus trained to break people, with no consequence or accountability to the public.

These are the same security forces allegedly contracted to torture people in Egyptian prisons and barracks as part of an extraordinary rendition program.